Best Fiends – Review

I’ve managed to avoid the whole Candy Crush thing so far, and flat out refuse to play a game made by King due to their workings, (don’t try and trademark ‘Candy’ for God’s sake!). Still, I wanted to find a good game for the mobile that had the same mechanics of swiping to get 3 or more in a row of a particular thing… you know what I mean.

While I have not played many of these games, I have dabbled occasionally and I have seen a new trend developing. Instead of the standard matching mechanic, many games are now bringing a fighting element to the play and now your gem matching abilities power up monsters to attack enemies. That seems to be the main focus of ‘Best Fiends’ and it is pretty fun to boot.

The tiles to match here are elements and you will unlock different characters or ‘fiends’ to match these, each fiend has its own abilities and can be upgraded to improve this. When you match 3 or more elements your fiend will attack, and deal damage depending on its level and how many elements you matched. The enemies themselves are big old ugly slugs and whilst they don’t attack back, they do have abilities of their own that can make them invanerable to attacks and can also change your elements breaking up your much needed combos.

Killing enemies is not the only objective that you need to complete in order to move on to future levels. You will also need to collect a certain number of elements as well. These objectives will change level to level and make you really have to think about what combos to use. This is not helped by the fact that you are only allowed a certain number of moves per game, but that just adds to the challenge.

The biggest thing that lets this game down is the fact that it’s free to play. I moan a lot about free to play games but they can be done well, I don’t mind paying money for bonuses but I get crabby when that game puts a wall in my way. Best Fiends dose a few of the classic free to play techniques by only allowing you a certain amount of energy that lets you play 10 or so games before having to naturally recharge over a long time, or you can pay to play faster. There are crystals and coins you can buy to upgrade your characters. The biggest thing that got me was paying for more moves. I am now at a point where as much as I play I can’t beat the level in the required moves, it’s not because I need to level my characters, the right elements simply don’t drop! Now instead of restarting, I can simply pay £0.69 for 5 more moves that would most likely sort me out. No Best Fiends, just no…

It’s a shame that I hit this soft pay wall as I was having fun with the game. It’s was going to get a pretty good score as well as it is actually fun to play, it’s just a bloody shame that it only lets you play every so often.